Tag Archives: Managing Change

The Meaning of Version 2.0

drawing

Version 2.0 is a good thing. Except when it’s not.

Being 2.0 means embracing something brand new, something different, revolutionary, totally revamped from the old 1.0 that’s just not as good. It’s simple math, really. 2.0 is twice of 1.0.

The terminology we use for what software developers call a “major version release” is a popular way to address all things new and cool. For instance, in 2010, Justin Bieber released his My World 2.0 album, charming fans world-wide with the #1 hit Baby.

In health care, we also like new versions. Typically used to describe a move towards all-digital access, a post on The Health Care Blog describes the evolving wave of patient self-scheduling methods as “2.0.” An Academic Radiology paper describes radiology education using computing devices over paper as “Radiology Education 2.0.” Even an iTunes app providing a set of emergency radiology teaching cases calls itself Radiology 2.0 (incidentally, because the software is in its first release, the app is actually “Radiology 2.0 v1.0”).

In fact, versioning in health care is so popular that when The American College of Radiology decided to push a new approach to imaging, it decided to skip 2.0 and start with Imaging 3.0.

Continue reading